Paranoia (40 page)

“He just passed,” I said. That was the way my dad talked: people “passed,” they didn’t die.

“Oh,” Jocelyn gasped. “Adam, I’m sorry.”

I asked her to cancel my appointments for the next couple of days, then asked her to connect me with Goddard. Flo picked up and said, “Hey there. The boss is out of the office—he’s about to fly to Tokyo tonight.” In a hushed voice, she asked, “How’s your father?”

“He just passed.” I went on quickly, “Obviously I’m going to be out of it for a couple of days and I wanted you to give Jock my apologies in advance—”

“Of
course
,” she said. “Of
course
. My condolences. I’m sure he’ll check in before he gets on the plane, but I know he’ll understand, don’t worry about it.”

Antwoine came into the waiting area, looking out of place, lost. “What do you want me to do now?” he asked gently.

“Nothing, Antwoine,” I said.

He hesitated. “You want me to clear my stuff out?”

“No, come on. You take your time.”

“It’s just that this came on suddenlike, and I don’t have any other place—”

“Stay in the apartment as long as you want,” I said.

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “You know, he did talk about you,” he said.

“Oh, sure,” I said. He was obviously feeling guilty about telling me that Dad hadn’t asked for me at the end. “I know that.”

A low, mellow chuckle. “Not always the most positive shit, but I think that’s how he showed his love, you know?”

“I know.”

“He was a tough old bastard, your father.”

“Yeah.”

“It took us some time to kind of work things out, you know.”

“He was pretty nasty to you.”

“That was just his way, you know. I didn’t let it get to me.”

“You took care of him,” I said. “That meant a lot to him even though he wasn’t able to say it.”

“I know, I know. Toward the end we kind of had a relationship.”

“He liked you.”

“I don’t know about that, but we had a relationship.”

“No, I think he liked you. I know he did.”

He paused. “He was a good man, you know.”

I didn’t know what to say in response to that. “You were really great with him, Antwoine,” I finally said. “I know that meant a lot to him.”

________

It’s funny: after that first time I broke out crying at my dad’s hospital bed, something in me shut down. I didn’t cry again, not for a long while. I felt like an arm that’s gone to sleep, gone all limp and prickly after having been lain on all night.

On the drive out to the funeral home I called Alana at work and got her voice mail, a message saying she was “out of the office” but would be checking her messages frequently. I remembered she was in Palo Alto. I called her cell, and she answered on the first ring.

“This is Alana.” I loved her voice: it was velvety smooth with a hint of huskiness.

“It’s Adam.”

“Hey, jerk.”

“What’d I do?”

“Aren’t you supposed to call a girl up the morning after you sleep with her, to make her feel less guilty about putting out?”

“God, Alana, I—”

“Some guys even send flowers,” she went on, businesslike. “Not that this has ever happened to me personally, but I’ve read about it in
Cosmo
.”

She was right, of course: I hadn’t called her, which was truly rude. But what was I supposed to tell her, the truth? That I hadn’t called her because I was frozen like some insect in amber and I didn’t know what to do? That I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to find a woman like her—she was an itch I couldn’t stop scratching—and yet I felt like a complete and total evil fraud? Yeah, I thought, you’ve read in
Cosmo
about how men are users, baby, but you have no idea.

“How’s Palo Alto?”

“Pretty, but you’re not changing the subject so easily.”

“Alana,” I said, “listen. I wanted to tell you—I got some bad news. My dad just died.”

“Oh, Adam. Oh, I’m so sorry. Oh God. I wish I were there.”

“Me, too.”

“What can I do?”

“Don’t worry about it, nothing.”

“Do you know . . . when the funeral’s going to be?”

“Couple of days.”

“I’ll be out here till Thursday. Adam, I’m so sorry.”

I called Seth next, who said pretty much the same thing: “Oh, man, buddy, I’m so sorry. What can I do?” People always say that, and it’s nice, but you do begin to wonder, what is there to do, right? It wasn’t like I wanted a casserole. I didn’t know what I wanted.

“Nothing, really.”

“Come on, I can get out of work at the law firm. No worries.”

“No, it’s okay, thanks, man.”

“There going to be a funeral and everything?”

“Yeah, probably. I’ll let you know.”

“Take care, buddy, huh?”

Then the cell phone rang in my hand. Meacham didn’t say hello or anything. His first words were, “Where the
fuck
have you been?”

“My father just died. About an hour ago.”

A long silence. “Jesus,” he said. Then he added stiffly, as if it were an afterthought: “Sorry to hear it.”

“Yep,” I said.

“Timing really sucks.”

“Yep,” I said, my anger flaring up. “I told him to wait.” Then I pressed
END
.

72

The funeral-home director was the same guy who’d handled Mom’s arrangements. He was a warm, amiable guy with hair a few shades too black and a large bristling mustache. His name was Frank—“just like your dad,” he pointed out. He showed me into the funeral parlor, which looked like an underfurnished suburban house with oriental rugs and dark furniture, a couple of rooms off a central hallway. His office was small and dark, with a few old-fashioned steel file cabinets and some framed copies of paintings of boats and landscapes. There was nothing phony about the guy; he really seemed to connect with me. Frank talked a little about when his father died, six years ago, and how hard it was. He offered me a box of Kleenex, but I didn’t need it. He took notes for the newspaper announcement—I wondered silently who would read it, who would really care—and we came up with the wording. I struggled to remember the name of Dad’s older sister, who was dead, even the names of his parents, who I think I’d seen less than ten times in my life and just called “Grandma” and “Grandpa.” Dad had had a strained relationship with his parents, so we barely saw them at all. I was a little fuzzy on Dad’s long and complicated employment history, and I may have left out a school where he’d worked, but I got the important ones.

Frank asked about Dad’s military record, and I only remembered that he’d done basic training in some army base and never went off anywhere to fight and he hated the army with a passion. He asked whether I wanted to have a flag on his coffin, which Dad was entitled to, as a veteran, but I said no, Dad wouldn’t have wanted a flag on top of his coffin. He would have railed against it, would have said something like, “The fuck you think I am, John F. Kennedy lying in fucking state?” He asked whether I wanted to have the army play “Taps,” which Dad was also entitled to, and he explained that these days there wasn’t actually a bugler, they usually played a tape recording at the graveside. I said no, Dad wouldn’t have wanted “Taps” either. I told him I wanted the funeral and everything as soon as he could possibly arrange it. I wanted to get it all over with.

Frank called the Catholic church where we had Mom’s funeral and scheduled a funeral mass for two days off. There were no out-of-town relatives, as far as I knew; the only survivors were a couple of cousins and an aunt he never saw. There were a couple of guys who I guess could be considered friends of his, even though they hadn’t talked for years; they all lived locally. He asked whether Dad had a suit I wanted him to be buried in. I said I thought he might, I’d check.

Then Frank took me downstairs to a suite of rooms where they had caskets on display. They all looked big and garish, just the sort of thing Dad would have made fun of. I remember him ranting once, around the time of Mom’s death, about the funeral industry and how it was all a monumental rip-off, how they charged you ridiculously inflated prices for coffins that just got buried anyway, so what was the point, and how he’d heard they usually replaced the expensive coffins with cheap pine ones when you weren’t looking. I knew that wasn’t true—I’d seen Mom’s coffin lowered into the ground with the dirt shoveled over it, and I didn’t think any kind of scam was possible unless they came in the middle of the night and dug it up, which I doubted.

Because of this suspicion—that was his excuse, anyway—Dad had picked out one of the cheapest caskets for Mom, cheap pine stained to look like mahogany. “Believe me,” he’d said to me in the funeral home when Mom died, when I was a slobbering mess, “your mother didn’t believe in wasting money.”

But I wasn’t going to do that to him, even though he was dead and wouldn’t know any different. I drove a Porsche, I lived in a huge apartment in Harbor Suites, and I could afford to buy a nice coffin for my father. With the money I was making from the job he kept ranting about. I picked out an elegant-looking mahogany one that had something called a “memory safe” in it, a drawer where you were supposed to put stuff that belonged to the deceased.

A couple of hours later I drove home and crawled into my never-made bed and fell asleep. Later in the day I drove over to Dad’s apartment and went through his closet, which I could tell hadn’t been opened in a long time, and found a cheap-looking blue suit, which I’d never seen him wear. There was a stripe of dust on each shoulder. I found a dress shirt, but couldn’t find a tie—I don’t think he ever wore a tie—so I decided to use one of my mine. I looked around the apartment for things I thought he’d want to be buried with. A pack of cigarettes, maybe.

I’d been afraid that going to the apartment would be hard, that I’d start crying again. But it just made me deeply sad to see what little the old guy had left behind—the faint cigarette stink, the wheelchair, the breathing tube, the Barcalounger. After an excruciating half hour of looking through his belongings I gave up and decided that I wouldn’t put anything in the “memory safe.” Leave it symbolically empty, why not.

When I got back home I picked out one of my least favorite ties, a blue-and-white rep tie that looked somber enough and I didn’t mind losing. I didn’t feel like driving back to the funeral home, so I brought it down to the concierge desk and asked to have it delivered.

The next day was the wake. I arrived at the funeral home about twenty minutes before it was to begin. The place was air-conditioned to almost frigid, and it smelled like air freshener. Frank asked if I wanted to “pay my respects” to Dad in private, and I said sure. He gestured toward one of the rooms off the central hall. When I entered the room and saw the open coffin I felt an electric jolt. Dad was lying there in the cheap blue suit and my striped blue tie, his hands crossed on his chest. I felt a swelling in my throat, but it subsided quickly, and I wasn’t moved to cry, which was strange. I just felt hollow.

He didn’t look at all real, but they never, ever do. Frank, or whoever had done the work, hadn’t done a bad job—hadn’t put on too much rouge or whatever—but he still looked like one of Madame Tussaud’s wax museum displays, if one of the better ones. The spirit leaves the body and there’s nothing a mortician can do to bring it back. His face was a fake-looking “flesh tone.” There seemed to be subtle brown lipstick on his lips. He looked a little less enraged than he had at the hospital, but they still hadn’t been able to make him look peaceful. I guess there was only so much they could do to smooth the furrow from his brow. His skin was cold now, and a lot waxier than it had felt in the hospital. I hesitated a moment before kissing his cheek; it felt strange, unnatural, unclean.

I stood there looking at this fleshy shell, this discarded husk, this pod that had once contained the mysterious and fearsome soul of my father. And I started talking to him, as I figure almost every son talks to his dead father. “Well, Dad,” I said, “you’re finally out of here. If there really is an afterlife, I hope you’re happier there than you were here.”

I felt sorry for him then, which was something I guess I was never quite able to feel when he was alive. I remembered a couple of times when he actually seemed to be happy, when I was a lot younger and he’d carry me around on his shoulders. A time when one of his teams had won a championship. The time he was hired by Bartholomew Browning. A few moments like that. But he rarely smiled, unless he was laughing his bitter laugh. Maybe he’d needed antidepressants, maybe that was his problem, but I doubted it. “I didn’t understand you so well, Dad,” I said. “But I really did try.”

Hardly anyone showed up in the three-hour span of time. There were some buddies of mine from high school, a couple with their wives, and two college friends. Dad’s elderly Aunt Irene came for a while and said, “Your father was very lucky to have you.” She had a faint Irish brogue and wore overpowering old-lady perfume. Seth came early and stayed late, kept me company. He told Dad stories in an attempt to make me laugh, famous anecdotes about Dad’s coaching days, tales that had become legend among my friends and at Bartholomew Browning. There was the time he took a marking pen and drew a line down the middle of a kid’s face mask, a big lunk named Pelly, then all the way down his uniform to the kid’s shoes, and along the grass in a straight line across the field, even though the pen didn’t make a mark on the grass, and he said, “You run
this
way, Pelly, you get it?
This
is the way you run.”

There was the time when he called time out and he went up to a football player named Steve and grabbed his face mask and said, “Are you stupid, Steve?” Then, without waiting for Steve to reply, he yanked the mask up and down, making Steve’s head nod like a doll’s. “Yes, I am, Coach,” he said in a squeaky imitation of Steve’s voice. The rest of the team thought it was funny, and most of them laughed. “Yes, I am stupid.”

There was the day when he called time out during a hockey game and started yelling at a kid named Resnick for playing too rough. He grabbed Resnick’s hockey stick and said, “Mr. Resnick, if I ever see you spear”—and he jabbed the stick into Resnick’s stomach, which instantly made Resnick throw up—“or butt-end”—and he slammed him again in the stomach with the stick—“I will destroy you.” And Resnick vomited blood, and then had the dry heaves. Nobody laughed.